Playing Chiptunes in a Web Browser by MultimediaMike at 2:29 AM EDT on July 17, 2012
Hi, first time poster to this forum. A colleague recommended that I drop a note about my new project which pertains to video game music.
The pitch is simple: Play chiptunes directly in a web browser. The website is here: Game Music Appreciation. So far, it catalogs NES, SNES, Game Boy, Nintendo DS, Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast chiptunes.
My colleague suggested that I should eventually incorporate vgmstream at some point. Meanwhile, I hope the site finds some fans from this forum.
I see some familiar names as I look at the main forum index-- Knurek, in particular, a prolific ripper/dumper. Go to my game music site and search for his name. The site indexes the metadata attached to the chiptunes, including ripper/dumper info, though it doesn't presently show that in the interface.
You might want to try using Portable Music Archive for Game Boy/Game Gear games, since the sets there are timed - all your Game Boy songs have 2:30 for the duration, which is obviously wrong.
You can try browsing other xxx.joshw.info sites, they should have more rips than Modland, I've stopped uploading there quite a while ago (xxx can be ssf, dsf, 2sf, nsf, hes, and maybe something else as well, can't recall ATM).
Neat site though, hopefully the server bill won't break your back. :)
Thanks, Knurek. Tracking down good archives of these tunes is one of the challenges for this project. Of course, if I do things right, it obviates the need for normal users to hunt down the songs. :)
Thanks for your work on the GBS metadata. I see that your items rely on separate .m3u files for metadata. I'm currently working on a tool to help me import that into the database. I also need it for KSS and HES files (which the player already supports thanks to libgme).
Thanks for the pointer to the various joshw.info sites. I harvested most of the Genesis tunes from smd.joshw.info. I didn't know he had all those other subdomains.
There's still a lot of work to do. But bandwidth and hosting costs are the least of my worries. :) My hosting plan gives me tons of bandwidth that I don't use each month.
@TheUltimateKoopa: True. None of the GBS files imported into my current database have M3U info associated with them. I didn't even realize that was a tagging option. I have a lot of work ahead of me to get the better GBS/M3U metadata sets into the database.
BTW, if anyone is interested, I posted the source code to the music player: SaltyGME source at Github
How do you know which vio2sf version I am using? I can't tell from the source code but the only version I am able to find from a Google search is v0.23. I would certainly like to get the latest version because I know of a few different Nintendo DS files that sound wrong.
This is a cool project, and it's easy to see you put a lot of work into it. Ever since I tried FlashNSF and the projects at hkpr.info (which you're also aware of), I've been hoping someone would make an accessible GME applet for browsers. I have to admit I'm a little disappointed that the app you've created is Chrome-specific and has to be installed, but I understand the reasons and the site you've set up is pretty wonderful. This is really great, something I've been waiting for a long time. Thank you.
If you do add support for VGMstream, you might want to start with the gradual introduction of DS/Saturn stuff, and Sega CD/Turbo CD when you expand into that. PS1 XA and Dreamcast and so on can get pretty large (not to mention resource intensive), and while bandwidth might not be a problem now, it's always hard to predict how long that will be true.
Once again, thank you very much for this! I wish I had half this much dedication to seeing a project through.